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John Woo Presents Stranglehold Impressions

We've played the demo that's hitting next-gen consoles and PC soon, and frankly, you'll be happy.

We've played a lot of John Woo Presents Stranglehold since our first fairly meaty hands-on earlier this year at Midway's media event in Las Vegas. Shortly before E3, we gave you an extensive overview of three of the game's levels, then we finagled some quality time with another level last month in Santa Monica. After months of our incessant chatter regarding the game, it's now your turn to step into the shoes of Inspector "Tequila" Yuen, as the Stranglehold demo releases on Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Store today. We crashed Midway's Chicago offices earlier this week for a hands-on with the build that you'll be playing, and proceeded to . The PC demo, we've discovered, will be coming later.

The demo will put you at the beginning of the game in the backalleys of Hong Kong in search of the Golden Rabbit restaurant. The first thing that's most apparent to us is that the demo, even on Normal or Hard difficulty, feels simpler than the final product likely will. That's not to say that Stranglehold is an impossibly difficult game based on our time with it, but the action feels very squeezed compared to the pacing of the builds we've played over the last six months.

The best thing that we can say, at this point, is that the targeting, probably our biggest complaint while playing build upon build of the game, has really gotten smoothed out. We'd initially griped that it didn't feel like there was a happy medium between too slow and too fast, and while many Max Payne vets will turn up the sensitivity to their liking, we feel like the sweet spot is pretty much there. The pacing feels much more intense than it has in prior builds, as enemies coming raining at some points; playing it on Hard will really give you the sense of ballet-like gunplay that has made Woo's films so entertaining for the past twenty-plus years.

Also, it seems that the demo has added lots of features that won't be a constant in the final game, from what we've played of near-complete levels around E3 time. The Shoot-outs, which are essentially real-time Mexican stand-offs in which Tequila primes his gun against three or four other gangsters, are much more plentiful in the demo than they were in the backalley level that we played six weeks ago. The first one's pretty over the top, as well, as we shot a canister, sent a thug flying into a concrete pillar and saw a flash of concrete, flesh, and blood smash against one another. "That's Havok at work," we said.

Besides Shoot-outs, we also noticed that environmental hazards are strewn about the level in large numbers. Perhaps our favorite, which was not in the build we played in late June, was a giant neon dragon sign that fells four guys at once. The first time we played the demo, we took everyone out before shooting the sign. The second time, we didn't quite pull it off correctly. The third time, we wished we had a capture station getting the footage. Eventually, you'll blast your way through myriad gun-toting thugs before you make your way to the bar where you'll face/off against your first boss. At that point, the demo wraps, but not without its own rewards. During your first run-through, you'll unlock the first Tequila Bomb, which allows you to heal yourself. After subsequent plays, you'll eventually get Precision Aiming, Barrage, and eventually, Spin Attack, which wipes everyone out except Tequila himself.

Also, you might notice if you go under the options menu, there are a variety of visual options you'll have to choose from for your display, which is a nice touch. Whether you have an LCD, a plasma, a rear-projection HD, standard def TV, or prefer different settings like high-contrast, film, bright, or vivid, there's something for you.

For those of you who either haven't downloaded the demo from Xbox Live Marketplace, are waiting for it to show up in the PlayStation Store, or are awaiting the PC build, we can say without hesitation that if you're a fan of the Max Payne games' rapid-fire shootouts or those games' source material, John Woo films, you'll be doing yourself a favor by queuing this one up once it's available.